Empathic Growth: Designing Human-Plant Interaction Through Artistic Exploration

This paper presents Empathic Growth, an inter-species interactive art installation that explores plant perception from a more-thanhuman perspective. Grounded in Jakob von Uexkull's concept of Umwelt, the installation recognizes plants as active participants with their own perceptual worlds. By visualizing the biosignals of both humans and plants in a shared environment, Empathic Growth creates a visualized space of shared perception, encouraging participants to reflect on plant agency and fostering empathy between species. The installation exhibition revealed that participants developed a greater awareness of plant perception and a deeper empathy for plant life, encouraging a rethinking of humanplant relationships. Through three iterative exhibitions, Empathic Growth evolved from an initial experiment exploring emotional symbiosis between humans and plants into a real-time interactive hybrid perception interface, ultimately into digital hybrid forms as an agent-based artificial life with collective behaviors. This process realized an exploration of the interaction of human-plant empathy and the digital artificial life of growth.